Monday, 1 August 2016

First and foremost, be aware this game is addictive. It took no effort to find myself fully occupied with killing titans, collecting artifacts and competing in tournaments. Welcome to July's highlighted phone app, the tap-fastic Tap Titans!

Name: Tap TitansCategory: GamePrice: FreeAvailable On: Android and AppleSurprisingly, Tap Titans spends more time open on my phone than PokemonGo. This is a game that can require little or all of your attention depending on how you wish to play. The basic principle is that you're on a mission to destroy or kill as many titans as you can, by tapping.To begin with you're on your own sword in hand facing a giant evil titan, and to attack you must tap your screen - feel free to do it as ferociously as you like. For each titan you kill you earn coins. These coins can be used to level up your own damage or hire heroes to help you out on your quest. The heroes you hire will attack the titan before you every second, and, like leveling up your tap, you can also pay to upgrade the damage per second (DPS) of each hero. The other handy thing about heroes is they'll keep working to bring in coins even while the app is closed. As you slice your way through titan after titan you move through stages and different landscapes such as Bucanero Bay, Haunted Graveyard and Mystic Castle. There are several different landscapes but as you play these do loop round. Reaching 'Rainforest 6' doesn't exactly bring along anything new.Of course the further you progress the stronger your opponents become and upgrades become more expensive. However, your heroes have your back as for every so many levels you upgrade them you can unlock their special skills which can boost damage or the amount of coins you receive.

Likewise as you level up your tap damage, you can unlock set skills. These skills can be activated regularly throughout the game but each require a varying cool down ranging from 5 minutes to an hour. Again each skill can be upgraded in order for them to be more effective. The first skill to become available is Heavenly Strike, which inflicts one surge of damage on your enemy, later Shadow Clone, Critical Strike, War Cry, Berserker Rage and Hand of Midas become available to unlock and use.

As I mentioned previously, in this game you move through landscapes after conquering a set amount of stages, or levels if you like. For each stage you must defeat 10 regular titans and a mini boss before moving on. The mini bosses are simply slightly stronger titans, the only difference being you have a limited amount of time to slay them. You only face a regular Boss when you reach the end of a set landscape's stages, again these are stronger titans and you only have 30 seconds to defeat them.You, or rather your character has no health in this game and therefore you can never really be defeated. Yay, a game you can't loose! Instead it all comes down to progress, and how much you can make. If you fail to kill a boss in time you remain on the same stage killing regular titans until you can earn enough coins to level up in a way that will allow you to kill the mini boss or boss, whichever it may be. Yet, although you have no health, the heroes you hire can be killed by either kind of boss. You can easily revive them for a hefty sum of diamonds, not coins, but usually this isn't necessary and you can carry on easily without them by leveling up other heroes or your tap until their cooldown is over and they revive themselves.

So yes, I mentioned diamonds. New topic. Diamonds are like a second form of currency in the game, of which I would say there are three; coins, diamonds and relics. But I'll get to the latter in a second. While coins are what you use to hire heroes, level up them and your tap as well as unlocking skills. Diamonds are used to either revive heroes or to buy perks. Perks!? Yes, perks, which simply just make the whole game a whole lot easier for little while. For instance a hundred diamonds can buy you 12 hours worth of coins, 24 hour protection for all your heroes so they can't die or an easy way to kill off a stubborn boss. They're worth having every once in a while when the game gets a little slow or you're getting stuck.

Diamonds are rarer then coins, and can either be acquired through visiting faeries which occasionally float across your screen with gifts. Diamonds also make up part of the prizes for competing in tournaments or dungeon fights, but again we'll come back to that.

The final 'currency' I mentioned was relics. Now relics are the rarest of all, they can be dropped by the occasional boss but mostly you only come across relics when you prestige. Relics only have one purpose, that is buying or upgrading artifacts. Artifacts are kind of similar to skills except they have a permanent effect. For instance purchasing artifacts can minimise the health of the bosses you face, maximise your total damage and even allow you to collect more gold while playing.

Once you reach a tap level of 600 you can prestige, which means starting from scratch. When you prestige you loose all your progress and start again with nothing except the diamonds, weapon upgrades, artifacts and relics you had managed to collect in the game. Each time you prestige you earn more relics and can advance through the game faster as a result of the artifacts that allows you to buy.

You know that a Dungeon Fight is open when a little circle which a demon appears on the left hand side of your screen. The Dungeon is usually open as a daily challenge you can participate in during the weekdays in order to win random perks and diamonds. The dungeon itself is simply like another landscape where you face a mega boss which gets stronger each day until you complete all rounds. It's usually worth saving up all your skills for when you enter the dungeon!

Then there's tournaments, where you compete with other players around the world to either obtain the highest combined level of heroes or to reach the furthest stage possible. Each tournament allows 24 hours, where you can opt in or out at any point but of course you do have to prestige in order to take part. Tournaments offer a extensive prize list which makes it really worth taking part as long as you end in one of the top 150 places.

And just when this game should have bored me to death I notice the promise of 'a second epic journey'. Damn my curiosity, but hopefully that's part of the game I will be able to update you on soon enough! Unfortunately as silly as this game is, it has kept me captivated for way too long. To begin with I was sure I'd find it monotonous and dull which funnily enough is rarely happened. Quite the accomplishment considering how dull the principle is - just tap your phone screen like a crazy thing!As you can probably gather by my long explanation this game operates on a few levels, meaning that you can always be playing and advancing. There's actually a big sense of accomplishment when you unlock each feature and race through levels. The game pushes you on by always giving you something to do, a way to get further and rewards you for every big step you make! Yes, I admit I gave this game waayyy too much of my time and am rather frankly glad that now this blog post will be finished and published I can delete it off my phone... Although that takes will power so I'll have to let you know how I get on with that.What do you think of this post, and Tap Titans? Is it something you see yourself playing or are there better phone games out there that you give your time to? Let me know in the comments, and remember to come back next month for August's featured App!

If you enjoyed this post, check out some of my other phone game recommendations such as:

Saturday, 30 July 2016

Remember that really, really ridiculously hot day the other week, so hot
that #hottestdayoftheyear took over twitter? When every British person united
to complain about our long awaited glimpse of summer. (Lesson learned, be
careful what you wish for!) Well, on that particular day I had nothing to do.
It was too hot to work on clearing my room, organising my life or doing any
productive, and unfortunately that heat happened to rise up in the middle of
the week so I had no one to bother with my company. Damn people, having to work
for a living. Within 10 minutes of trying to read in the garden I was pretty
much stewing in my own sweat and struggling to breathe through the humidity,
there was no breeze and God, I needed air. So after lolling around the house
for a little while, unable to get comfortable or settle anywhere, I had a
magical idea. Why not go for a walk in the park? Okay, okay, actually exercise
was the furthest thing from my mind, what I was really thinking about was cold,
refreshing, delicious ice cream. But from that came the revelation that I could
satisfy this craving quite quickly by popping over to my local park’s little
tea room.

So book in hand and a last minute thought for my camera and the opportunity
to work on my very amateur photography skills I headed out. It was lovely to
stroll around the park and observe families enjoying the weather together. I
took a fair few photos before settling down under a tree with my novel and long
awaited mint choc chip ice cream, and here's a few I thought I'd share.